A veteran journalist on why Darwinism is falling apart

“The science of neo-Darwinism was poor all along, and supported by very few facts. I have become ever more convinced that, although Darwinism has been promoted as science, its unstated role has been to prop up a philosophy—the philosophy of materialism—and atheism along with it.” (Page 20)

“The scientific evidence for evolution is not only weaker than is generally supposed, but as new discoveries have been made since 1959, the reasons for accepting the theory have diminished rather than increased.” Page 45

“Darwinian evolution can be seen as a way of looking at the history of life through the distorting lens of Progress. Given enough time, society in general, including human beings, would be transformed into something superior and perhaps unrecognizably different.” Page 248

“Lewontin’s worldview encouraged him to take a critical look at natural selection, which Darwinians have almost always been reluctant to do. Today, in fact, some of those who might well agree with Lewontin about natural selection are likely to remain silent lest their unorthodoxy should attract reprisals within the academy. Lewontin had no such fears, and he made an impression on me and many others for that reason.” Page 69

“Darwin might well have been dismayed if the meager evidence for natural selection, assembled over many years, had been presented to him 150 years after The Origin was published. ‘A change in the ratio of preexisting varieties? That is all you have been able to come up with?’ he might reasonably have asked. It is worth bearing in mind how feeble this evidence is, any time someone tells you that Darwinism is a fact.” Page 79

“Natural selection functions in the realm of philosophy, not science.” Page 81

“Evolutionists, of course, believe that they are appealing to science, in contrast to the religionists’ reliance on faith. But the truth is that when they utter their two-word incantation, ‘natural selection,’ they are not being remotely scientific. Nor are they expected to provide any details.” Page 123

Each of the points he makes could be unpacked into a tractor trailer. But start with the book.

He’s right about Darwin’s followers ruling without evidence and many recent events, including the Royal Society rethinking evolution, show the tension. The principal question remains then the same as with peer review scandals, why does such corruption go so long unamended?

Tom Bethell graduated from Oxford University and is a long-time journalist who has served as Washington editor for Harper’s, a contributing editor to Washington Monthly, and a senior editor at The American Spectator. He has written articles for many magazines, including Fortune, the New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic Monthly. Praised by Tom Wolfe as “one of our most brilliant essayists,” Bethell is the previous author of The Noblest Triumph: Property through the Ages and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science. He resides in Washington, DC.

It doesn’t take long after asking for actual details that the mocking begins. It ranges from “you and your pathetic requests for pathetic levels of detail” to “what are the details of how your Designer did it.”

I noted an interesting view of “evolutionary evidence” just yesterday when a commentator cited a scientific paper which showed statistical correlations between genome size and mutation rates. See? Evidence for evolution.
Well, the problem is that the correlation could have been positive or negative, and it would be evidence for evolution. If there was no correlation, that also would be evidence (proving that mutations are randomly independent of genome size).
All of those statistical outcomes work well.
That seems to be true of so much of it. Statistically, one thing seems similar to another, therefore evolution is the cause of it.

Tom Bethell’s Rebuke to Fellow Journalists: A Skeptical Look at Evolution Is Not Beyond Your Powers – January 31, 2017
Excerpt: “Colin Patterson told me that he was looking for cases where the actual common ancestor of two given species was identified in the diagram on display. These would be at the “nodes” in the tree of life. But all the nodes shown in the museum were vacant. Patterson told me that as far as he could see, nodes are always empty in diagrams of the tree of life.,,,”
– Tom Bethel
Experimentation shows that organisms “evolve” — only to revert to a mean, a predictable “Reversion to the Average,” as famed breeder Luther Burbank put it. Species “inhabit ‘plateaus’ of limited space upon which variants are free to roam,” says Bethell. Artificial selection, beloved by Darwin, can “push” varieties around the plateau, nothing more.http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....03461.html

I was fine with Darwinism through high school, although I noticed that biology and geology seemed to prop each other up and I never got a good answer to that question.

Then in college, I noticed the conceptual similarity of Darwinism to Von Helmont’s experiment, which supposedly demonstrated spontaneous generation over time. But what really pushed it all over the edge of credibility was studying some of the incredibly complex chemical cycles needed for cellular metabolism. Someone had created a wall full of these cycles, and Darwinism became a relic of the 19th century, wooden ships, and racial superiority.

I didn’t reject Darwinism because of my Christian faith, I rejected it because it’s just plain lousy science.

Querius, you should try engineering, especially electronics and software, but also control systems, or numerous others within the broader discipline. All of them illustrate conclusively that it is much much easier to design something that doesn’t work than something that does work, and this just grows increasingly more difficult as the complexity of the “something” increases.

I’m not arguing complex things can’t happen thru natural processes, but I am arguing that **highly** complex things never happen in the sense of them being replete with multiple fuctioning systems, all interoperating together with each other, sharing signals and information.

Molecular biologist Francis Crick said the same thing. “Your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules,” he wrote. Or as he put it more succinctly, “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.”

Reminder to myself to keep that last quoted sentence.

Seversky claimed recently “nobody believes” what Crick said right there.

Just ordered my copy,,, this blurb under the video I listed in post 7 sold me,,,

“In Darwin’s House of Cards, veteran journalist Tom Bethell records his own investigation of the evidence for evolution, including interviews with lions of science and philosophy such as Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Colin Patterson, and Karl Popper.”

I’m not arguing complex things can’t happen thru natural processes, but I am arguing that **highly** complex things never happen in the sense of them being replete with multiple fuctioning systems, all interoperating together with each other, sharing signals and information.

Actually, if

— we are talking about inanimate matter,

— and we aren’t talking about the inevitable results of the laws of physics applied to a given environment, as in, say, a star, a planet or a rock forming, as opposed to, say, a non-inevitable result such as a television set (we expected to find the Martian landscape littered with rocks and boulders, but not television sets — they aren’t inevitable).

— but we are talking about significant functional complexity

then one will never even find merely complex things happening through natural processes.

This is because matter inexorably seeks a more likely state, and functional complexity is its least likely state.

I am more than halfway through the book and it is a magnificent tour de force, marvelous writing style, impeccable clarity. Very different approach from Behe or Meyer’s biological detail and Axe’s extensive use of analogy and beef up of the reader’s confidence in their own thinking.

This book is crammed full of Darwinist contradictions and laughable logic but where it shines the most is showing without any doubt that Darwinism is unfalsifiable in the absolute. He does this by multiple historical references to the contradictions where Darwinism/ neo-Darwinism was first shown to be proven by one set of circumstances and then when those circumstances are falsified, then Darwinism also supposedly predicted said falsification. Similarly in how Darwinist predictions can be generally incompatible logically. I especially like the discussion on the fossil record and how paleontologists now consider the worldwide fossil collection virtually complete, but how most Darwinists are still waiting for more fossils to help prove longstanding principles such as “intermediate forms” that surely existed hee hee.

The completeness and organization of this work is stunning and should hopefully stun the right people.

Yes, indeed. I once tried programming a simulation of an ecosystem. I tried to make it simple at first, then added complexity. But no matter how I tweaked it, populations would start oscillating, small at first and then to extremes, quickly destroying the ecosystem’s carrying capacity.

And remember protoplasm, that magical jelly of life at the base of all life?

So now, it’s high time to pry the cold, dead fingers of Charles Darwin and his ideas about the “favoured races” from the throat of Science. This vestige of wooden ships and colonialism needs to pass into history with all the other hopeful, but failed hypotheses.